Gucci abandons "worn-out ritual" of seasonal fashion shows
Gucci's creative director Alessandro Michele has announced that the Italian brand will be disregarding the fashion calendar's "stale" deadlines, holding shows just twice a year instead to reduce waste.
In a series of entries shared from his personal diary, called Notes from the Silence, Michele inwardly reflects on the environmental damage of the fashion industry and the part his brand has played in this, and his decision to stop following the same cycle.
He explains that Gucci will be abandoning the traditional fashion rota of staging five shows per year under the seasonal labels of cruise, pre-fall, spring-summer and fall-winter.
Gucci cuts number of annual shows from five to two
Instead, the fashion brand will present shows irregularly just twice a year on its own terms. Michele shared the news from his Instagram account on Sunday 24 May.
"Two appointments a year are more than enough to give time to form a creative thought, and to give more time to this system," Michele stated in a virtual press conference broadcast from his Rome studio on Monday 25 May.
The decision, he says, comes in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has led him to rethink "the meaning of [his] actions" and "change a lot of things in the way [he] work[s]".
View this post on Instagram
"We understood we went way too far," he writes. "Our reckless actions have burned the house we live in... We usurped nature, we dominated and wounded it."
"Now that the devastation caught us unprepared, we have to think about what we would not want to be the same as it was."
"Our history is littered with crises that taught us nothing," the entries continue. "With economic collapses and social devastations that were tackled by imposing the same recipes from which they originated."
"This present, then, entrusts us with important responsibilities... this crisis has somehow amplified such transformative urgency, which can't be deferred anymore."
This is why, Michele writes, he has decided to pave the way for a less destructive future, "away from deadlines that the industry consolidated".
"I will abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities"
The Italian brand has no plans for a show in September – when it would typically showcase its latest collection as part of Milan Fashion Week.
"It's a foundational act, audacious but necessary, that aims at building a new creative universe," he says. "A universe that essentialises itself in the subtraction of events and that oxygenates through the multiplication of sense."
He hopes that other designers will join him in his change of pace and approach towards fashion, to create a future that "contains the hug that today we cannot give each other".
Gucci's news comes at a time when fashion weeks across the globe are starting to transition to digital formats in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
This includes London Fashion Week, which will take place online between 12 and 14 June, and Milan Fashion Week, which will be held digitally from 14 to 17 July.
Paris' haute couture Fashion Week will also be going ahead online only from 6 to 8 July, followed by Paris' menswear fashion week from 9 to 13 July.
Main image from Gucci's A/W 2020 show.